Learning from Wood

What would be their capacity?

It is mostly the same for each factory – around 70,000 to 80,000 tsubo.

Polus seams to be servicing all the Japan?

Mostly mainland. We don’t sell to the islands.

Do you export?

We usually don’t. We did couple times to Thailand and Korea, but it is not our practice. The post and beam construction that we specialize in is only popular in Japan.

Are you looking into expanding overseas?

The quality issue is important. If we export the material expands in transit and may not be appropriate for construction. Therefore shipping outside Japan is a problem.

Do you have the capacity for custom work or is it strictly mass a produced product?

We can say it is customized. When there are ten houses to be built on one lot, they are never the same. We have the capacity to customize to a degree.

Would you work with architects on single unique designs, or do you only target contractors and developers?

We do both. We actually have a lot of orders from architects.

Our clients range from contractors to carpenters, wood companies to architects.

Do you work with heavy timber or do you only work with the glulam?

In this plant we mostly use glulam, but we can work with heavy timber as well.

Could you expand a little on the history of the company?

The founder of the company came to Saitama (where Polus-Tec headquarters are) looking for job in around 60 years ago. He had a part time job selling bananas and small produce. He met a lot of people this way. At that time the housing construction in Japan was very outdated. He wanted to improve the industry. PolusTec was one of the first companies that started an automated manufacturing process. Before that carpenters were doing everything by hand.

Today Polus has training courses for carpenters where they teach 122